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Some new things: in NS on Joshua Clover's 1989 book, on NS on the Stirling Prize, - and taking Urban Trawl to Cardiff for BD, which will be followed at some point by the obligatory footnoting, nuancing and whatever the opposite of nuancing is.

Neon Lights, Shimmering

The NASDAQ sign was loved and mourned mainly by those who had no love for its market values.

Marshall Berman, On the Town - 100 Years of Spectacle in Times Square

Or: some dialectic on enlightenment. There have been some very interesting recent books by American academics on the architectural culture of the Weimar Republic, all of which seem to be disguised ways of writing about contemporary architecture. Kathleen James-Chakraborty's German Architecture for a Mass Audience, Janet Ward's Weimar Surfaces and Sabine Hake's Topographies of Class all attempt to upend, with varying degrees of success, the versions of Modernism inherited from Philip Johnson's classicisation and bastardisation of Weimar in The International Style, and all of them rediscover an architecture of consumerism, flash and spectacle in an only retrospectively uneasy coexistence with an architecture of socialism and urbanist rationalisation - in more-or-less explicit critique of a cityscape unevenly divided between icons and blandness. One of the most intriguing elements in all of them is the discussion of a certain architectural culture of light. This reached its most extensive form in the Berlin Im Licht events of 1928, where the city's electrical companies collaborated in an urban light show. Meanwhile, the shopping streets and office blocks were regularly illuminated with an intensity and imagination only seen elsewhere at the time in New York. Neon as much as socialism is a neglected element in the modernist city, and it's good to be reminded of the notion of the city as bright lights, rather than slatted wood.

One of many reasons why I distrust the work of postmodernist theorist-architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown is the way in which, in the pomo manifesto Learning from Las Vegas, they spend lots of time talking about a city where the architecture is essentially made of neon - a dematerialised, night architecture of signs, lurid artificial colours, of figures and objects moving in an unreal space, which is a wholly modernist environment, one celebrated by Marshall Berman in the context of Times Square in the fine On the Town, the love for neon adverts on the part of those who have no particular love for the products being advertised - and then eventually favour something much less interesting, a vernacular of deliberate dullness.



What bothers me about Venturi/Scott-Brown is that their actual architecture, and that of the overwhelming majority of postmodernist architects, seems to have so little interest in this architecture of light and technological city-design - in terms of the actual practice, the skewed modernish/traditionalish conjunctions and intellectual gameplaying seem far more important. Funnily enough, browsing through their website, it seems they've finally got round to designing a building where light is a major factor in the design, and it's in the form of a pair of skyscrapers in Shanghai, dressed with 'electronic ornaments' (image via this interview), in a place where their New Urbanist comrades won't be snooping to make sure all is sufficiently 19th century. The reason this is on my mind, other than it being firework night, is that winter is on the way, which in any big city is actually a rather exciting experience, where previously prosaic landscapes become quite exciting through their illumination. Some London examples: if you trace at night the Barbican walkways all the way past the Museum of London, you get to a junction of four buildings, one by Farrell, one by Foster, one by Eric Parry and one Rogers. Only the the latter would get a second glance from me during the day, but on a cold night, with the walkways leading their almost arbitrary paths through them, they become positively fascinating, their nasty stone, their formal ineptitude and their general lumpen blandness being effaced, and the promises of transparency and a city of light and suspension seems tantalisingly close to being fulfilled - though there is of course nothing to actually see but hundreds of rapidly emptying offices.

There's a few instances of this in my area of London, which exemplify this rule of dreadful architecture interestingly illustrated by its lighting schemes. Chief among them is SOM's Pan Peninsula, a absolutely vile block of flats in the Isle of Dogs, which markets itself with an impressive lack of ideological guile as 'the place to live above all others'. In the daytime it's a shocker, a white-tile clad, spectacularly ungainly and clumsy bit of yuppie-stacking, sterile in a drab rather than icy way, and the promise of 'inspired apartments' on the American Psycho-esque website fails to make up for its architectural shortcomings. What does almost make up for them is the lighting scheme. Now maybe I'm still a bedazzled provincial, but I always enjoy the light show it puts on, where the towers are illuminated by minimalist strips of neon which - oh yes - change colours as you watch. It has a palpable sense of urban drama which the building itself entirely lacks. Another, this time on my side of the river, is Farrell's new office blocks, a nearly as slapdash barcode-façade fest, adjoining the Millennium Dome. Again, during the day this is a terrible mess, but in the darkness their kitsch lighting schemes have a sublime poignancy and vacant beauty, something only emphasised by the drizzly sight of Canary Wharf in the distance.

To 'take a bath of light', as the striking epigraph to On the Town has it, you have to venture into enemy territory, whether it's to the tourist-centred mini-Times Square at Piccadilly Circus, or into the locked-down, privately patrolled citadels of capital at the City of London and Canary Wharf, its lights 'taking the piss' out of the surrounding area, as Dizzee Rascal once put it - then there's the neon film atop the BT Tower - beautiful, but a reminder of the privatisation of Eric Bedford's monument to 1960s Bennism. Weimar Berlin had much the same predicament - the Reklamarchitektur or 'advertising architecture' of Erich Mendelsohn, where light was at least as important as concrete and glass, was in implicit opposition to the residential architecture of Bruno Taut, which was blaringly bright during the day but necessarily visually quiet at night, as people have to sleep there. Contemporary with Mendelsohn and just before Berlin Im Licht, there were experiments in light architecture in the USSR, for the 10th anniversary of the October revolution. You can see clips of this in Dziga Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin, a reclamation of light architecture for the purposes of public celebration rather than the hawking of goods. Yet these celebrations coincided with the final quashing of the Left Opposition in the USSR, and the images in Vertov mainly consist of the ziggurat of Lenin's tomb being illuminated, using light to mystify rather than enlighten, as would Albert Speer, several years later. Whether for political or commercial reasons, light is an overlooked urban object, and I suspect any mundane block of flats that proposed 'electronic ornaments' on its façade would face the middlebrow wrath of CABE in an instant. Looking out of my window, the only thing which stands out among the murky yellow sodium, and an eternally comforting sight in that context, is the sign of the Hong Kong Garden takeaway. Its lurid hot pink banner offers little more than an all-too-frequently irresistible promise of monosodium glutamate, but it's the most beautiful thing on the street.

Pandaemonium: A Film Proposal

'From Birmingham to Wolverhampton, a distance of thirteen miles, the country was curious and amusing; though not very pleasing to eyes, ears or taste; for part of it seemed a sort of pandemonium on earth - a region of smoke and fire filling the whole area between earth and heaven; amongst which certain figures of human shape - if shape they had - were seen occasionally to glide from one cauldron of curling-flame to another. The eye could not descry any form or colour indicative of country - of the hues and aspect of nature, or anything human or divine. Although nearly mid-day, in summer, the sun and sky were obscured and discoloured; something like horses, men, women, and children occasionally seemed to move in the midst of the black and yellow smoke and flashes of fire; but were again lost in obscurity. A straggling boy or girl was at times seen in the road, with uncombed, uncut hair, unwashed skin, and naked limbs, which appeared as if smoke-dried, and encased with a compound of that element and soot...the surface of the earth is covered and loaded with its own entrails, which afford employment and livelihood for thousands of the human race'.

John Britton, Autobiography (1850)

There is, rather astoundingly, no great (or, it would seem, even not-so-great) film about the industrial revolution, something which is rather odd, considering what happened in those 50 or so years had more lasting effect on the future development of the human race than practically anything else before or since - so we can only assume the fact it hasn't appeared on screen is because of some strange unconscious prohibition on representing our primal scene. There are countless films about either working industry or what happens to the industrial when it de-industrialises, and several films set in the period (1790s to 1850s, roughly) where it occurs for the first time - all those Jane Austen or Dickens adaptations, they all take place at the same time that the modern world is being created in Cottonopolis, while Bill Douglas' Comrades, about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, might be connected with the birth of the labour movement, but necessarily not in the crucible where 'new-fangled men' were formed (is this a question of expense, I wonder, or based on the lasting English suspicion of the cities we nearly all live in?). So, a proposal for any lurking film producers. The film is called Pandaemonium and is partly based on Humphrey Jennings' book of 'images' of the Coming of the Machine, though intimate knowledge of volume 1 of Capital and Francis Klingender's Art and the Industrial Revolution will be assumed.

It'll be filmed in Cottonopolis, obviously (it can be Rochdale or Stockport or the West Riding if the rent in Manchester is too high), with some scenes in the aforementioned Black Country, but there will, emphatically, be no social realism, no Hovis advert moments, with absolutely nothing picturesque, rather the sublime. It'll be based on contemporary descriptions, which are as far from 'realist' as could be imagined - so there will be small armies of women and children attached to vast power-looms, mills more vast than any building previously imagined (Schinkel sketching 'the architecture of the future' can feature in), there will be rivers and canals dyed satanic colours, the sun blotted out by the accumulated smoke. The main characters will participate in riots and secret societies, and die before they turn 20 (as they would have done). The sets will take an idea from Klingender, that John Martin's illustrations to Milton's Paradise Lost, specifically of Pandaemonium, the palace of the devils, were based on seeing the birth of the industrial world; ie, it will be based on the paintings attached here. There will be lots of CGI fiddling about, lots of imaginary sets, no historically faithful use of original lighting or contemporary technologies - instead, the sheer unprecedented nature of the new world will be stressed. It might be difficult finding actors who don't mind just being the appendages of giant machines, but otherwise this is surely a guaranteed hit, and I'll only require a Monsieur Verdoux-style 'from an idea by' credit at the start...

Hard Graft

Some overkill: two pieces about T Dan Smith, one (short) for BD, one (long) for 3:AM.

Also: the interviews I refer to are being uploaded onto Side TV, and make very interesting viewing....

Suburban Sketch Two

Family history corner. My Dad is from Perivale, a suburban area of West London built around the Western Avenue, one of the arterial roads that burst out of London in the '30s, and the setting for much of J.G Ballard's Crash, as this is what the Westway transforms into before getting to Northolt Aerodrome. Despite having lived in London for over 10 years, I had never been to Perivale, and after long talking about visiting 'the ancestral home', we finally got round to it last weekend. The tube train emerges from the depths at Park Royal, and ploughs through acres of factories and shiny new (or not-so-new - the post industrial is old hat by now after all) business parks, and eventually comes here, next to the untamed parkland of Horsenden Hill, to a Charles Holden-esque station designed by Brian Lewis, opened in 1947. Here you can see Holden's style going austere, with none of the Piccadilly Line's Cathedral-like spaces, but the welcoming curve and expanse of glass still have more than a shadow of that style.

But it becomes obvious very quickly that public transport is not what this place is all about. This is Starvin Marvin's, a (possibly reconstructed, like the one in Canning Town, possibly newly built) 1950s American diner. It's the once-terrifying future as a benign, nostalgic joke, and next to it is a building which shows how English car culture was rather less exciting than the American - a shopping parade built by my great-grandfather. Shabby, mostly derelict shops, brown aggregate, sort-of-vaguely neo-Georgian. He put his family up in the flats above, although my grandmother was the only one who didn't get to own her bit, perhaps because she'd married a manual worker with Commie tendencies.

Dad says that there were a huge amount of deaths on this road when he lived here in the 1960s, people just walking into it, without realising that cars would zoom at them doing 80mph. The motorway bridge takes a strange route - rather than a simple a-to-b it curves around from the shopping parade to the road with the tube station on, feeling out of kilter with the road's relentless straightness.

Family Hatherley lived here on the ground floor, with a Turkish family living upstairs. A sign on the house says '1913'. I assume this place was another result of my great-grandfather's spec building activities, although it's a shame he didn't invest in a half-decent architect. A path from here leads you to a weather-boarded medieval church, and an achingly pretty, verdant pathway which leads to a tennis court and a boarded-up toilet. Apparently, the last time Dad was here, the green below was a park.

Fantasies of Falling Down-style anti-golf revenge come later. There is a Western Avenue in Los Angeles.

In the churchyard this gravestone proves Egon Schiele was influenced by the typography of late 19th century Perivale.

The most famous thing about Perivale is the Hoover Factory, designed by Wallis Gilbert between 1932 and 1938. Due to its 'jazz ornament', it was described by Pevsner as a 'monstrosity'. Monstrosities are usually very interesting. This is the canteen block, designed in 1938 when Wallis had added proper Corbusian Modernism to his Americanist neo-Egyptian cake mix, hence the expansive, sheer glass, grafted into the symmetries. I was hoping it would still be where the cafe is, but no such luck.

Every little detail here was designed and thought about, in a crazed capitalistic evil twin to the more Fabian total design projects of the London Underground (although Wallis designed the more sober Victoria Coach Station for Frank Pick soon after). It's all equally extravagant, from the gateposts to the tiles to the screens to the signs to the fences to the security gates. It tells you that the manufacture of vacuum cleaners is a rather dynastic business, something which involves opulence, slave armies and the mummification of the dead emperors, but without all the sand and putrefaction that tended to go along with ancient Egypt.

The later-to-be Nancy Hatherley worked on the production lines of the Hoover Factory during World War Two, when it was turned over to electrical components for airplanes and tanks. Her sister, my late great-aunt and fervent Conservative Party supporter Ruth Silwood (the annual argument at Christmas was always the highlight as far as I was concerned), was a factory supervisor, and after the war she bought a garage in Southall, then a hotel on the isle of Wight. By hook and crook she managed to get the entire family to move with her to the south coast, where my grandparents, one of whom died around a decade before I was born, lived in a Fareham bungalow. Nancy eventually went to the Isle of Wight too, to a first-floor flat that is still the first place that comes to my mind when I'm in any cafe, restaurant or boutique designed between 1950 and 1980.

The Hoover Factory is now Tesco (of course it is), and as you can see, the new additions are very much in keeping. I go inside, to use the loo and to see if the cafe is also in neo-deco style, but it's a Costa Coffee the same as every other Costa Coffee, with the snow-white concrete and the lurid reds and greens replaced by self-effacing earth tones.

All photos by Frances Hatherley

Promotional

Should you be so inclined, you can listen to me pontificating about nostalgia at Frieze, recorded a couple of weeks ago, minus illustrative material. I end up concentrating on the eugh-austerity-nostalgia side rather than the hmmm-resentment-plus-historical-materialism-plus-nostalgia-may-be-interesting side of a perhaps overcomplicated position - or one which has become so since I was savaged by a dead sheep a little while ago.

Also! There are more Zero Books out or on the way - Dominic Fox's Cold World, which you should know about already, Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman and Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, both of which are excellent and carrying on in the Qualified Abstract Noun vein, and I suspect there will be more plugging of them nearer their release. There is also The Resistible Demise Of Michael Jackson, which is amongst other things a fantastic collection of writing on pop, and within which I have an expanded version of my post on the King of Pop's Stalinist tendencies. On which subject, watch the video above if you doubt my assertion.

were they ever, your people, leonine?

Anyone who is not doing so should be following Dominic Fox's ongoing attempt to revise Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Mask Of Anarchy.

Suburban Sketch One

(first part of an entirely non-rigorous prospective series in response to a creeping revalourisation of suburbia that I may, or may not, be partly imagining)

Today I went back to Bluewater. I had two appointments at the M25's delightful Darent Valley Hospital, one in the early morning, one late afternoon, and I decided that it might be a more interesting means of spending an extended lunchbreak than sitting in the hospital branch of Upper Crust and reading Eric Hobsbawm. The first time I went there, with I.T, who combined pics with quotes from Ballard's underrated last novel, and from whom I have swiped these images without asking, I was a little underwhelmed - having spent much of my childhood and youth in Malls (like 90% or so of those born since the 1970s) it felt like a familiar but expanded version of something I already knew very well indeed - the only novelty seemed to be the extraordinary setting, a gigantic Firing Squad-friendly bowl carved out of a chalk pit, perfect for dealing with us when we start to get off our fucking knees. This time I explored it in a bit more depth, and its complexities and contradictions became more apparent, without necessarily making it a more pleasant place.

I hadn't realised, given the hospital's hilltop encampment-like position, that I was so close to Bluewater in my twice-a-month-at-least appointments. I was walking distance, in fact, or rather I would be if there were any means of walking there. What infuriates anyone used to enjoying the city through walking its short-cuts, walkways, underpasses, parks and general non-routes is that the place is so obsessively channelled, to an extent that makes most modernist housing projects look like models of extreme libertarianism. As the crow flies, or in a post-apocalyptic, car-free scenario, I could walk about 5 minutes from the outpatients to the back-end of Bluewater, counting in some tricksy negotiation of the chalk cliffs. Pedestrians are necessarily bus-riders, as there is literally NO WAY of just turning up and walking into Bluewater, something which I'm sure Americans are rather used to, but for us is still relatively shocking. Eric Kuhne, the architect whose firm CivicArts designed Bluewater, opines in a rather fascinating interview that Bluewater is a city rather than a retail destination. In terms of its size and population, this is true (plus you could count its appendage, Ebbsfleet new town, which I have yet to visit), so we need to evaluate exactly what sort of a city this is - a city with one ceremonial entrance, which can only be entered in a vehicle, where nothing is produced but where many things are consumed. The only sort of regime that could set up such a controlled, channelled city is a dictatorship or oligarchy. Neatly enough, Kuhne explicitly praises 'benevolent despotism' and critiques the very notion of democratic city planning in the above interview, with admirable frankness. Yet following Patrick Keiller's account of finding 'a small, intense man reading Walter Benjamin' in Brent Cross ('Robinson embraced the man and they talked for hours...yet the number he gave him was that of a telephone box in Cricklewood'), it's clear that Bluewater is one of the many possible termini of the 19th century Arcades that bore through the solidity of the baroque city, their iron and glass construction the 'unconscious' of architecture, an oneiric, ethereal harbinger of the future amidst the ostentatiously solid architecture of imperialism - the place where the 'dreaming collective' spend their time. As the bus winds through a series of roundabouts on its way from the hospital to the mall that is yards away, you see the elevations that are the (basically irrelevant) 'face' of the building - a series of spiked glass domes, over a long, bulbous metal roof, which shimmers in the exurban autumn sunshine.

Inside, the first impression - this is half-term, after all - is of everything happening at once. The city of Bluewater soon reveals itself to be docile, unsurprisingly considering the draconian code of conduct, and there's only the slightest hint of menace - but the entrance is chaos. First you go past the standard-issue Blair-era retail architecture of a Marks and Spencers, and then you hit something odd - four glass prisms, seemingly at random, part of the glazed part of the building that ushers you in. This might just be ineptitude, but presumably the designers know what they're doing here, given the (as we shall see) heavily didactic elements of the interior, but exactly what is unclear. They're 'toys', these, as Charles Jencks used to write about postmodernist architecture's little devices, they're purist solids straight out of L'Espirit Nouveau, they're the building's 'logo' - but if so, a remarkably asymmetrical and unmemorable one. Then, you come up to a series of tall pillars, and two overhead walkways crossing each other, a suspended ceiling imprinted with a seemingly endless leaf motif, with the glare of the glazed entrance intensifying the effect - the shopping mall sublime, exacerbated by the thousands of people browsing/watching/buying/eating/expelling their waste (this is a city where these are the only acts that are permitted to occur), and it's thrilling in its way, although the pale stone-ish substance with which almost everything is clad always softens the effect, stops it from ever becoming really jarring and strange - that way lies the Tricorn and a bankrupt Alec Coleman. Walking around inside, you find a large quantity of public art, and a surprisingly large amount of seating - is this, then, a version of the Urban Task Force, with its mixed use and its encouragement of sociality? Kuhne talks of 'special meeting places' that 'dignify the heroic routine of everyday life that drives you to produce a better world for yourself and your kids'. It could be Richard Rogers, this stuff, except that unlike the Plazas of the Urban Task Forces, people are actually using it, and in droves - apart from one closed noodle bar, you'd have to look damn hard here to find even the slightest hint that we're in the middle of the longest recession in British economic history (though the sorting depot nearby tells a different story). Unnervingly, it supports the idea of the financial crash as a kind of Phony War, which will intensify only later, but will be truly horrendous when it does.

I'm trying to look at Bluewater with equanimity, but I don't like this place. I feel ill at ease here. As with so much else, it's a place in which I would have felt completely at home when I was 12 years old, but education, relocation and (ahem) ambition have led me to the point where I go to a place like this and think (and I'm not proud of this) 'there but for the grace of God go I'. I know full well that poncing around here dressed like Lord Alfred Douglas, with my bourgeoisified vowels and cotton wool stuck over the place where the catheter was 10 minutes ago, I'm committing an offence against the dreaming collective, by attempting to be different from it (or at least outside of the acceptable frame of twentysomething male difference: sporty/straight/indie kid/hipster/emo/chav/hiphop). Yet nobody is bothered. This might be the burbs, but in a place like this in Southampton I'd be getting dirty looks and be at risk of worse. This, presumably, is a result of the city being administered as a police state, and maybe the thugs are all at Lakeside. I think sometimes I might like to be comfortable here, but it's not the same as actually being comfortable. I'll persist with second-hand bookshops and charity shops, although will try not to delude myself they're morally superior. Regardless, everyone else has something better to do, and activity is constant. This is ironic enough, as the interior decorating of Bluewater has some interesting things to say about activity.

For something which is supposedly The Authentic Expression Of Our Real Uncomplicated Desires (as per countless suburbia-loving libertarians since the 50s, most of whom seem to live in the nicer bits of inner cities), Bluewater is extremely didactic in its design. It's trying to make various points to its clientele, something which very few seem to have noticed, whether critics or shoppers. So there are little torn-out-of-context fragments from Vita Sackville-West, Laurie Lee and Robert Bridges, all of them on the glories of the countryside, its products and pleasures - well, there is agriculture nearby, of a heavily mechanised sort, although the M25 is the more obvious land usage. It's there to establish continuity, to convince you that the city of Bluewater is a faintly rustic experience, without relinquishing one iota the imperatives of steel and glass - no urban-regen wood panelling here, no Scando. One of the raised Arcades here is illuminated by the partly glazed ceilings, borrowed from Soane, according to Hugh Pearman, combined with the obligatory reference to long-dead local industry - in this case, the pointy tops of oatings - has a series of inset relief sculptures. These immortalise all the jobs that once existed here, an accounting of the professions of the workshop of the world. Fishermen, Goldsmiths, Tanners, whatever, the list is practically endless, all these people who used to make stuff, while beneath them are those taking time off from intellectual labour in services financial, administrative and such. It's a quasi-religious thing, this - an attempt at appeasing the Gods of industry as they are replaced by the newer Gods of consumption (both equally implacable and brutal deities, which only seem opposed via a complicated geopolitical subterfuge). What makes Bluewater's didacticism interesting is that through its poems, its fibre-glass leaves and its statues of ironmongers, it comes out and proclaims its transcendence of nature and labour, precisely by memorialising it. When just-in-time production and distribution seizes up and we can actually walk to it, we can look at Bluewater's sentimental memorials and try and remember exactly what it was we used to do.

The Loneliness of the Exurban Dancer

From the synopsis, Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank would seem to be yet another entry in the Dance, Prole, Dance! subgenre. Set in an estate out in Tilbury, it charts the life of someone who one of the reviews said 'you wouldn't want to meet down a dark alley' (do a search on the reviews for Fish Tank to find an impressively consistent level of class snobbery across the papers, incidentally). Played by a 17 year-old picked up by a casting director who heard her shouting at her boyfriend in the street in Essex, our protagonist is bored, aggressive, stuck between a mouthy younger sister and a decidedly louche mother who looks barely ten years older than her. Yet now and then, she goes into an abandoned flat in her estate and has a bit of a dance ('only when I'm dancing can I feel this free', etc, delete as applicable). Around the same time, her mum's soft-spoken Irish boyfriend enters the picture, with his compliments on her dancing, his hep record collection (Bobby Womack, Basic Channel, Soul Jazz compilations) and his restorative trips to the countryside. It won the Jury Award at Cannes, as films which show the English lumpenproletariat behaving in a picturesquely venal fashion tend to do very well among continental intellectuals, no doubt for the same reason we apparently like Stella Artois adverts and Cinema Paradiso. Part of what makes Fish Tank so refreshing is that it subtly upends the expectation of how the above configuration will end up (which I'm not mentioning here, so as not to spoil), and it resists sentimentality, although not intensity or (suppressed) emotion. It skirts perilously close to social realist cliche, but always pulls away from it - with the exception of an outrageously bad final shot, where Arnold suddenly slips from being a Tilbury Tarkovsky into a sink estate Sam Mendes.

Ostensibly, this is fairly similar to Red Road, set on the titular Glasgow high-rises. Both deal with sociopathic women pursuing venal men round the remnants of post-war architecture, both have a visual intensity, an interest in light, place and style that is rare in the Calvinist world of Loachian realism, and both are torn between icy disconnection and incipient let's-all-have-a-hug reconnection. Red Road veers far too close to the latter near its end, where an existentialist thriller suddenly becomes bad telly, where the ferociously driven (and ferociously blank) heroine is suddenly revealed to have a past, to have her reasons, to have a constructed alibi for her previously compellingly impenetrable actions. Excepting said final shot, Fish Tank doesn't make the same mistake, and there is never a group hug, and nobody learns anything. Yet what takes it out of the realm of quite-good social realist film-making and into somewhere more extraordinary is the use of music and setting, which are picked with a subtlety and drama decidedly lacking in Red Road, where Oasis memorably soundtracked one tower block party. The opening scene sets out the stall brilliantly - our protagonist stares at a group of women in the open space of a council estate, acting out the dance moves from the video to Cassie's Me & U, their aggressive faces and human bodies all wrong for the droning pornbot electro of the song and the botoxed, autotuned, airbrushed world of the R&B video. Our protagonist just stares at them, rapt. Another equally sad, surreal scene involves the telly which is always on, a perennial ambient chatter, with some dancing in front of a Ja Rule video, with its presentation of impossible luxury and almost comically basic presentation of sexual relations.

This continues through the music brought in by the seemingly lovely Irish boyfriend - 70s soul presenting itself as a relief from the wasteland and claustrophobia of outer Outer London - yet this reveals itself to be every bit as false an escape as that presented by the videos. And interestingly, and marking this film out from the dance-prole-dance genre, our protagonist is a fairly crap dancer - full of pent-up energy, but also pretty inept, and naively unaware of what role the dancing girl is supposed to play in the 21st century libidinal economy as a quasi-pornographic ornament - hence the fine Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner denouement to the dancing subplot. Elsewhere, Rhythm and Sound are used as a tense, weirdly lit eroticism, the thickness and sibilance of the sticky, smeared echo sounding like an illness, a feverish dream of the old reggae records played at her mum's house parties. Later, a brief blast of Original Nuttah becomes peculiarly still, its date-stamped rush overlaid onto folk looking calmly, statically out of their balconies. There's also an almost unbearably poignant scene involving a track from Illmatic which would have made a far better ending than the maddeningly awful final moments....but music's mediascape is alternately connected and disconnected from the Tilbury landscape in which the film is set - and it's this which finally inoculates it against type.

It's interesting that Arnold is from Dartford, as my initial guesses for where this was set were in that area - Slade Green, Erith, the landscape which appears at the edges of east and south-east London, where the thick, viscous, brown river widens, the industry gentrified out of the centre reappears, as do the people who aren't sufficiently Vibrant for the urban renaissance. It's a violently disjointed world, where smaller structures - Barratt cul-de-sacs, bungalows, lost fragments of '30s suburbia - are loomed down upon by the vastness of the marshes, the towering cranes and pylons, the blocks spaced out amidst yawning spaces. Fish Tank is not sociology, but Arnold's presentation of the estate's compressed over-activity rang true, as did the particular character of insult. Rather than the sub-Jane Jacobs notion that any sort of communality is impossible in these modernist, streetless developments, we see an area where the windows are permanently open much as the telly is permanently on, where you can look down to see whoever new may or may not be entering the area, where washing is hung out to dry on the crowded walkways, where people sunbathe on the strips of municipal grass. This overactivity is overlaid onto an industrial stillness, and the framing always emphasises these disparities, always looks for the image where the characters are overshadowed or warped by place. The Irish boyfriend at his job in an industrial park, his genial figure overshadowed by a series of blue, bulgingly robotic cranes, as if as a warning; oil refineries looming over the Thames' furthermost reaches, un-used, undesignated inbetween spaces never offering relief, and the warped evening light that pours in through the wide windows casting dreamlike, feverishly sexual patterns of light into the sweaty, noisy Parker-Morris rooms. More than any inner city, this is what space looks like when nobody has ever cared for it, planned or designed it (or cared only for their corner of it, the interiors of their flats or their driveways). It's a place which already feels post-apocalyptic, as unforgettable as Tarkovsky's Estonia - yet with the people included who are cropped out of the photos of picturesque ruination.

Martin Parr, Collector and Historian

The other day I was in Tyneside to review an exhibition about T Dan Smith, and while there myself and the I.T girl (who was coming along to take photos, before deciding the weather was too awful to do such a thing) popped into The Baltic to enjoy the wonders of the Urban Renaissance. There was soon to be a Damien Hirst retrospective, but luckily we didn't have to suffer this. What there was, however, was Parrworld, which led to me and I.T, usually so politico-aesthetically sympatico, disagreeing on something. This isn't necessarily because I disagreed with her hostility to Parr and all his works - the words 'irony' and 'end of history' were mentioned - but because I am entirely a sucker for this sort of thing, for these decontextualised collections of political-aesthetic tat. In short, Parrworld (as profiled by this Guardian video) is an exhibition of the man's vast collection, to coincide no doubt with the equally vast (and frankly covetable) book of said collection. Here we have an array of postcards of postwar architecture, the seaside, holiday camps or in commemoration of sundry disasters; a huge collection of photobooks which includes everything from El Lissitzky to Robert Frank; photography, often of Britain, including John Davies' astonishing English landscapes (more of which presently); and, most famously/notoriously, a vast collection of political ephemera in vitrines - the Saddam loo roll, the Bush N' Bin Laden geegaws, Sputnik inkwells, Miners' Strike commemorative plates.

First of all, I have very little time for Martin Parr as a photographer, with the possible exception of the Signs of the Times book (which, much like Abigail's Party, is both a compendium of snobbery and agenuinely chilling insight into Thatcherism). Myself and Joel Anderson have a sort of refrain on our Urban Trawl for Building Design - 'nah, that's a bit Parr', a way of stopping ourselves. This happened first when we saw a bustling farmer's market with nostalgic red & white stalls spreading out from Southampton's Bargate. Fuck that. Too picturesque. We established a strict policy of no 'local colour', no people doing interesting things, no ooh-look-we're-so-eccentric-in-England, but instead tried to make the photographs as wilfully blank as possible. But in that we might well have been influenced by case for the defence #1, Boring Postcards. I don't really give a shit whether or not Parr himself or his audience think Boring Postcards is funny, a nostalgiafest analogue to Crap Towns. When I saw it for the first time I thought it was shockingly beautiful, a hauntingly still document of popular modernism, and it marks (along with the Birmingham scene of Broadcast/Pram/Plone) the first obvious example of the now common the-future-didn't-happen-after-all aesthetic, the revisionism that placed 1950s civic centres and swimming baths along with the Radiophonic Workshop in the area where rock & roll and pop formerly sat. Indeed, I have my own burgeoning collection of 'boring' postcards, and am consistently awed and impressed by the supposedly mundane places that were once considered worthy of a mass produced piece of card. For this if nothing else, Parr has done history some minor service.

Parrworld is too much, far too much, and if I weren't an inveterate collector of tat myself (it occurred to me looking at all this that, in the unlikely event I ever ended up wealthy, I would build up a collection much like this, albeit perhaps without the Obama breakfast cereal and so forth) I would probably be far more hostile. My first response was a consumerist one - oh wow, look at all this beautiful stuff, looking round eagerly at postcards, at silver-coated books on the steel industry of Soviet Kazakhstan, at Yuri Gagarin memorial pens, whatever. Nina reckons, and she is of course right, that this decontextualised pile up is just an exemplar of postmodernism at its worst, an end of history scenario where we can just accumulate ephemera from a time where we actually believed in stuff, place it untouchable under glass, and nothing need ever happen ever again. But what relation does all this stuff have to the aestheticisation of politics? The room with the cases full of Soviet space program whatnot, War Against Terror memorabilia and Miners' Strike posters and plates places all of these things on the same plane. They're all of curio value, and by implication so are their politics, both are fundamentally as picturesquely eccentric as his own photographs, examples of our 'foibles' (as Parr himself puts it). I'm still trying to defend Parrworld as we cross to the Newcastle side of the Tyne, and notice that one of the Miners' Strike posters decorates the front of the Baltic. 'VICTORY TO THE MINERS. VICTORY TO THE WORKING CLASS'. It's like being punched in the guts. In a city which once had some sort of pride in its politics, in an area which dreamed of socialism and self-education, all that becomes a striking, historically rueful what were we thinking? advert to be placed next to the ad for the Damien Hirst show. The very fact it's there is a sign of the working class' neutralisation, the fact that those in the yuppiedromes which tower along the Quayside don't fear it any longer - or at least, that the poster reassures them they no longer need to be afraid.